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Television representations of the British postwar working woman have been afforded little consideration in British historical television scholarship. In its exploration of two early 1960s female ensemble television series set in the workplace, Compact (1962–1965) and The Rag Trade (1961–1963), this article makes a significant feminist intervention in the reinstatement of this neglected figure into extant critical television histories. It also demonstrates that implicit media discourses around women balancing work and home life customarily situated in the latter part of the twentieth century were already in circulation in the early 1960s. Introduction Television representations of the postwar British working woman have been afforded little consideration in British historical television scholarship. The article explores two early 1960s female ensemble television series set in the workplace, Compact.
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Television Series. (1962–1965) and The Rag Trade. Television Series. (1961–1963), which concentrate on this neglected figure and in so doing makes a significant feminist intervention into extant critical television histories.
Additionally, the article demonstrates that implicit media discourses around the ability to balance work and home life were already in circulation in the early 1960s, challenging the customary situation of these as pertaining exclusively to the 1980s and 1990s and beyond. Women in the Television Workplace Two of the most popular BBC television series of the early 1960s were Compact. Television Series. (1962–1965), one of television's first soap operas set in the offices of a women's magazine, created by Hazel Adair and Peter Ling, and the situation comedy The Rag Trade. Television Series.
(1961–1963) written by Ronald Wolfe and Ronald Chesney, chronicling the exploits of a group of women machinists working in the garment factory of Fenner Fashions in East London. In interview (September 2011) Adair talked to me about the ten million viewers that Compact regularly received.
All subsequent references to Adair are taken from this interview. The Rag Trade had audiences of eleven million and was made into a West End stage show (as recalled in Ronald Wolfe's obituary) and was such a popular format that it was remade in 1977, as well as having international remakes in Norway, Portugal, Australia, and most recently South Africa. See (accessed March 27, 2013). Compact and The Rag Trade are notable in that in both series it is groups of strong, forceful women who play the leading characters. Moreover, it is these women's public working lives and their daily triumphs and tribulations in the office and the factory around which the series narratives are developed.
Compact and The Rag Trade are now neglected in any extant overviews of British television history, such as Andrew Crisell's Introductory History of British Broadcasting ( Crisell, Andrew. Introductory History of British Broadcasting.
London: Routledge. ) or Michele Hilmes and Jason Jacobs’ The Television History Book ( Hilmes, Michele, and Jason Jacobs.
The Television History Book. London: BFI Publishing. They are also absent from academic studies of genre. Compact is not covered by Charlotte Brunsdon ( Brunsdon, Charlotte. Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to Satellite Dish.
London: Routledge., Brunsdon, Charlotte. The Feminist, the Housewife and the Soap Opera.
London: Clarendon Press., Brunsdon, Charlotte. Feminist Television Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ), Christine Geraghty, Christine. Women and Soap Opera: A Study of Prime Time Soaps. Oxford: Polity Press. (1990), or Dorothy Hobson ( Hobson, Dorothy.
Oxford: Polity Press. ) in their very extensive work on soap opera. In the case of The Rag Trade, Brett Mills, author of genre study The Sitcom ( Mills, Brett. The Sitcom TV Genres. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.
), writes on the hierarchy of sitcom, which he adjudges primarily as defined by a sitcom's critical standing, that The Rag Trade is one of “a range of successful programmes with high viewing figures” that has “never troubled the study of sitcom” ( Mills, Brett. The Sitcom TV Genres. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press., 12). From the perspective of critical histories of women's television, the lack of attention paid to Compact and The Rag Trade is of particular concern, for both are significant for what they have to say about British women's lives and experiences in the early postwar period. Compact and The Rag Trade offer rich televisual representations of the figure of the postwar working woman, situating her in the world outside the home, as well as within a family context as wife, mother, or girlfriend as was then more customary.
In “ The Avengers: Public Pedagogy and the Development of British Women's Consciousness,” Robin Redmon Wright in a discussion about the significance of the first Avengers female lead, “all action woman” Dr Cathy Gale, cites interviewees’ perspectives on the kind of women they saw on British television of the early 1960s: “One woman, now a scientist and researcher, compared Gale with other female characters on television That was the other role model Women were not doing things” ( Wright, Robin Redmon. “ The Avengers: Public Pedagogy and the Development of British Women's Consciousness.” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 115: 63– 72., 67). Another woman described several contemporaneous prime-time programmes and the female roles in them: “They were meek, obedient wives and mothers” ( Wright, Robin Redmon.
“ The Avengers: Public Pedagogy and the Development of British Women's Consciousness.” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 115: 63– 72., 67). In contrast, in The Rag Trade and Compact there were active, self-confident women taking the lead, as editor of a magazine in Compact and as a forceful trade union representative in The Rag Trade.
The two series situated women within the public sphere of the office and the factory, presenting them variously as bosses and employees, colleagues, and mentors. They were seen as part of a female office hierarchy in Compact, and as part of an almost exclusively female workforce on the factory floor in The Rag Trade.
Compact and The Rag Trade also offered quite contrasting accounts of women's working life and workplace cultures in terms of social class and aspiration. Compact magazine was a workplace redolent of achievement and success; implicitly middle-class, it was an environment where women could be observed holding down creative and fulfilling professional jobs and careers, whilst running glamorous and exciting professional and personal lives. It was also a location in which the possibility of social and geographical mobility was evident. Young, working-class women recruited into junior administrative positions reported to more senior female colleagues, from very different class backgrounds.
Such a social mix offered these young women access to new possibilities beyond the limits of the world from which they originated. On the other hand, Fenner Fashions, the fictional factory in which The Rag Trade was set, was a chaotic environment crowded with women doing repetitive, blue-collar piece work, eager to find any excuse to break off from their sewing. The possibilities of social mobility were not much in evidence. In The Rag Trade life and aspirations were firmly anchored within the physical and cultural boundaries of working-class east London. What was evident, however, was a vibrant, supportive, female working-class culture of clear personal freedom and licence, where the comedy was driven by the women's spirited and ongoing challenges to patriarchal or middle-class attitudes and codes of behaviour. In this article, I reconsider these two series featuring women's working lives, reinstating them within both critical television histories of British situation comedy and soap opera, and crucially histories of British television for women, at the same time as examining the televisual representations that they offer of postwar British independent working women. The historical figure of the working woman on US television as she has appeared in drama and comedy has been the subject of substantial critical attention.
Dow's Prime-Time Feminism ( Dow, Bonnie J. Prime-time Feminism: Television, Media Culture and the Women's Movement since 1970.
Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. ), in its account of the historical relationships between television entertainment and feminism, gives consideration to series and characters in which the lives and concerns of working women feature. The series that she examines include That Girl (ABC That Girl. Television Series.
–1971) featuring Marlo Thomas as a wannabe young actress trying to make her way in New York; The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Television Series. –1977), in which Moore plays Mary Richards, the quintessential early 1970s career girl; and Rhoda (MTM Rhoda. Television Series. –1978) which charts Mary's friend's return to New York and her workplace and personal experiences. Serafina Bathrick ( Bathrick, Serafina.
“ The Mary Tyler Moore Show at Home and at Work.” In Critiquing the Sitcom: A Reader, edited by Joanne Morreale, 155– 187. USA: Syracuse University Press.
) and Susan Crozier ( Crozier, Susan. “ Making it After All: A Reparative Reading of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 11 (1): 51– 67. ) have also written on the character of Mary Richards, while Julie D'Acci examined Cagney & Lacey ( D'acci, Julie. Defining Women: Television and the Case of Cagney & Lacey. Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press. ), the CBS drama series (1981–1988), which featured the lives of women police officers. Lehman's Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Popular Culture ( Lehman, Katherine J.
Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Popular Culture. Kansas: University Press of Kansas.
) analyses representations of the career or working girl within wider US postwar popular culture. Noteworthy is that all these US series focus on individual women whereas, as will be developed further in this article, the UK programmes are more interested in ensemble interaction: women working together. This attention to the figure of the working woman, directly or indirectly to be found in critical reflections on US postwar television culture, is not paralleled in the treatment of her British contemporary. In discussing the series I examine key episodes of Compact and The Rag Trade, locating them within the context of the genre of soap opera and situation comedy, respectively, in which they operate, and the mobilisation of genre conventions deployed in making the representation of working women which the series offer. Also significant in this case, as previously mentioned, is that the series both revolve around strong female casts. British feminist television studies are now exploring the female ensemble drama; for example Ball, Vicky.
Heroine Television: The Case of the British Female Ensemble Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Heroine Television: The Case of the British Female Ensemble Drama offers an historical overview of the genre, exploring the female ensemble drama through chronological thematic case studies of key series. In this article, pace Ball, I consider the impact on Compact and The Rag Trade of a cast in which women and their stories are central. This research was developed as part of the AHRC-funded project A History of Television for Women in Britain 1947–1989, jointly hosted by Warwick and De Montfort Universities.
Compact and “Having it All” There are very few remaining recorded episodes of Compact available to view. This reflects historical institutional policies regarding the preservation of television. Compact was understood in its period as popular, live, serial television of the moment, to be consumed and then discarded, the emphasis always on the production of the next episode.
Although I have been able to view very little of Compact, using the BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC) institutional files for the series, contemporary Radio Times files, and material from the interview with Adair cited above I have been able to recreate a workable understanding of the programme's content, production processes, and the relationship its writers had with their creation. I use the method pioneered by Jason Jacobs in The Intimate Screen ( Jacobs, Jason.
The Intimate Screen. Oxford: Clarendon. ) in which he used floor plans, shooting scripts, and WAC files to reconstruct early BBC TV drama. The episode which dates from January 4, 1962, and which this article explores, is one of the earliest, in fact the second.
It is important to point out here that this episode represents the first incarnation of the series. Joanne Minster, the editor of the magazine, was replaced after six months by a male editor—Ian Harmon, played by Ronald Allen. Allen was to become best known as David Hunter in Adair and Ling's next serial drama Crossroads ( Crossroads. Television Series. This was entirely due to the phenomenal popularity with viewers of Allen as a handsome male pin-up rather than any issues around having a female editor. Minster was, within the Compact narrative, sent to establish a sister edition in an unspecified European city.
This analysis therefore is concentrated on the period when Compact was run by a female editor. It depicts the early days of the magazine, and establishes a number of the type of ongoing serial storylines, dealing with both the workplace and the home, on which soap opera is built, and which developed as the series continued. Hazel Adair, who also wrote scripts for Emergency—Ward 10 and went on to co-create Crossroads, has throughout her career been involved in writing serial dramas which feature women located in the workplace. Compact was studio-set, with the action revolving around key locations, in the case of this particular episode various parts of the office and editor-in-chief Joanne Minster's home. Watching this episode what is clear is that Compact, with its central London office setting, is stylistically and thematically different to the other early television soap operas.
BBC's The Grove Family ( The Grove Family. Television Series. –1957), which charted the everyday lives of the Groves, was set in a modest, middle-class family house on a suburban London street. The house had a builders’ yard, owned by Mr Grove who employed his son there as part of the business. In Coronation Street ( Coronation Street.
Television Series. –present) the setting was again local; events taking place in a working-class community located in a few streets of Weatherfield, a fictional town in industrial north-west England.
In both The Grove Family and Coronation Street, women were situated either within the home or the public spaces offered in the community. Whilst in Coronation Street we do see women in the workplace, it is in traditionally feminine roles such as barmaid or shop assistant.
The closest comparison with Compact can be made with ITV's Emergency—Ward 10 ( Emergency—Ward 10. Television Series. –1967) which, like Compact, featured women working in the public sphere of a hospital ward.
The difference is that the women at work we see in Emergency—Ward 10 are in the again traditionally feminine nurturing profession of nursing, cast in caring, supportive roles in the tight-knit community of a local hospital, working in busy, functional hospital wards; certainly not striving to climb the professional ladder in a glamorous London office. In contrast, noticeable from the very opening scenes of this episode of Compact is the aspirational nature of the drama.
Connections are clear with the wider world outside home and family. The location, Enterprise House, was supposed to be in the Victoria district of central London—an area then full of new or planned high-rise office developments, and of course very close to both the official governmental world of Westminster and the exclusive residential neighbourhoods of Chelsea, Kensington, and Belgravia. The office reception area is stylishly furnished with contemporary, modernist sofas and easy chairs, wall-mounted magazine spreads, fashionable hanging lights, large vases of flowers, and pot plants. The offices are similarly furnished large, light spaces. In this thriving workplace women are very much to the fore. For the women watching, a range of potentially desirable role models were on display.
The principal character in Compact's early incarnation is editor-in-chief, thirty-something Joanne Minster who has full responsibility for running the magazine. This work on Compact developed from the AHRC-funded research project “A History of Television for Women in Britain 1947–1989” run jointly by Warwick and De Montfort Universities. When principal investigator Rachel Moseley was invited on to BBC Radio 4’s Woman's Hour in August 2011 to discuss the project's work on the programme, presenter Jenni Murray talked about the possibilities of having a career in the media that the programme's portrayal of women in the workplace suggested to her. Minster occupies a demanding professional role and is tasked with taking high-level decisions such as in the cliff-hanger posed at the end of the episode where she is held responsible for tackling the magazine's falling circulation. We watch her in consultation with various members of staff, offering advice and guidance or looking at work they are contributing to the magazine. This mentoring seems a particularly feminised kind of work activity.
It is notable that we are seeing a woman who is in charge of managing and assessing her male employees’ work. Minster is very much a high-flying “career woman”: a figure that popularly tends to be associated with the 1980s, when second-wave feminism's influence was to be felt in cultural changes to women's attitudes, aspirations, and attainments in the workplace. In Minster we encounter a comparable figure in the workplace of some twenty years earlier, not customarily a period in which we might locate women who had successfully climbed the corporate ladder. Yet women were very much in evidence in the postwar workplace, and Minster represents something of the possibilities that existed for an ambitious, intelligent, postwar woman. At the same time what is also evident is that in the character of Minster the “thrusting career woman” image of the 1980s is nuanced in interesting ways. Although in a very senior position, Minster presents herself as a supportive and nurturing boss available to guide and support junior colleagues, and moreover a boss operating within an environment surrounded by other women.
Minster is not located as a lone female figure struggling to make it in a hostile, male-dominated world. Indeed evident are a range of women of different ages, and at different career stages at work in a variety of roles within the Compact offices, as well as a range of female workplace relationships. Kay, the receptionist, is a confident, impeccably turned out young woman, whose position in the London office of a glossy magazine like Compact offers both the current pleasures of being part of this professional world and the possible opportunities it might bring. Helen Gray, like Joanne Minster another senior member of staff in her early forties and newly recruited as an editor of the problem and advice columns, is seen discussing work with her own very competent twenty-something secretary Sally.
Sally in turn offers advice to another even younger secretary about the best way to manage her own boss. For the younger women the office offers female role models such as Gray and Minster, and Sally herself is able to offer guidance to a much younger and less experienced female colleague. For women watching Compact, not only were there many female role models but a representation of a workplace in which a female community and hierarchy existed.
The Compact office was the kind of place where women viewers could dream of working and of having a career. Adair said of Compact that she knew that women viewers responded to the glamour and female ambition which the series represented. In Gerry Holloway's Women and Work in Britain since 1840 ( Holloway, Gerry.
Women and Work in Britain since 1840. London: Routledge. ) she notes that “The 1950s and 1960s is regarded as a period dominated by the centrality of family life” (2005, 194). However she goes on to explain that after initial rising wartime unemployment there was a high demand for women workers, mentioning “new areas of employment stimulated by the development of the Welfare state and the consumer market” (2005, 194). Both the women producing ready-to-wear fast fashion and the magazine staff of Compact were involved in the production of goods and services which supplied this growing consumer market.
Additionally with the raising of the school leaving age in 1947 to fifteen, “more girls were progressing to colleges and universities and consequently these women were looking for more fulfilling jobs than their mothers had engaged in” (2005, 195). These are the kind of women who might well have sought out the opportunities available in organisations like Compact. In Compact the industry presented—women's magazines—is one in which it is plausible that women could well be in important and influential positions, as is the case with Joanne Minster. All the editors in chief at British Vogue had been female. The editor of Woman magazine from 1940 to 1962 Mary Grieve, and then editor of Vogue Audrey Withers, were chosen to appear on the 1951 BBC women's television panel discussion series Woman's Viewpoint in which prominent public women discussed issues of contemporary importance. Madge Garland, who had been fashion editor at Vogue in the 1930s, was made the Royal College of Art's first professor of fashion in 1948.
She went on to develop and build up the courses taken by leaders of 1960s and 1970s fashion such as Ossie Clark, Zandra Rhodes, and Marion Foale. Adair had worked for women's magazines herself, so Compact is a fictionalisation of a world which she had observed. I explored with Adair the idea that it was as a woman writer that she saw possibilities in creating a drama based around a workplace in which women played significant roles. Although Adair was clear that this had not been on her mind at the time, she was open to the notion that as a woman she implicitly saw the magazine environment as an interesting site for dramatic stories, when male writers might not have been aware of how fruitful this would be. Compact is important historical women's television, precisely because it turns the spotlight on an industry where women did have significant roles to play. I move now to consider a rather different scene towards the end of the episode, which places Joanne Minster at home, presumably after her day in the office. She is in her kitchen, preparing dinner for her husband.
He is the tall, dark, and handsome male archetype, smartly dressed, and may well have been cast to add still further to the glamour and desirability of Joanne's life. He too, we learn, is a managing director of an unspecified business. This is clearly a very successful “power couple.” The kitchen features the kind of aspirational design that a reader might see in a fashionable interiors magazine of the period such as Homes and Garden, or House Beautiful. At the “Career Girls on the Small Screen” event held by the History of Television for Women in Britain project held in October 2011 at the Leicester Phoenix arts centre, this episode of Compact was screened. Participants remarked both on the upmarket design of the kitchen and some commented how it was very unlike the more modest kitchens they remembered. Joanne is shown in a more traditionally domestic feminine role as homemaker and wife, wearing a pale shirt-waister dress and apron, in contrast to her formal, structured work dresses and jackets. In the workplace attire of Minster and her senior female colleagues we see something of the mature professional women's workplace wardrobe of the period: smart, simple shift dresses, bold “statement” pieces of costume jewellery, and short, highly lacquered “fixed” hair make up what we can retrospectively describe as embryonic office “power” dressing, twenty years before such a notion became the staple formula for describing the square-shouldered business suits and stiletto heels of the archetypal 1980s female executive.
The dresses and bold jewellery of Compact seem like 1980s “power dressing,” a no-nonsense female equivalent of the male business suit. Such looks can be seen in, for example, the formal sheath dresses, tailored suits, and hats to be seen in Vogue magazine features on the Pierre Balmain and Christian Dior collections from 1961 and 1962. They toast the end of the working week with glasses of sherry and Joanne's husband suggests that they might go for a Mediterranean cruise at Easter. Joanne protests pressure of work but they laughingly embrace then go on to discuss the possibility of a week in Bermuda in October. Joanne's personal life seems to offer to an audience the same possibilities that are to be seen in her workplace role; prosperous upper-middle-class living, from the up-to-the-minute kitchen fittings and fixtures, to a late evening supper with a handsome and successful husband, commencing with glasses of sherry.
At the same time here is a woman attempting to balance, reconcile, and enjoy what looks like a happy, busy home life with the demands of her work schedule. That Joanne is unable to take up the offer of a cruise due to work pressures is not a dilemma we would customarily link with the early 1960s. The scene offers further insights into her personal and working life, allowing the viewer to observe her daily balancing act, juggling personal and professional lives. That said, this is treated rather lightly, not at all the source of tension associated with marrying such disparate responsibilities to be found in 1980s and beyond in representations of working women's lives. In fact Joanne seems a rather idealised figure, congruent perhaps more with representations of a picture perfect middle-class life of the kind we might find in advertising of the period. This management of the work–life balance is a theme, as already indicated, that might more readily be associated as beginning with career women of the 1980s, moving from there to the possibility (or impossibility) of “having it all” discourses which developed around women's professional and personal lives in the 1990s and beyond. Such discourses have been explored in the extant literature on television and post-feminism.
Rachel Moseley and Jacinda Read's MOSELEY, RACHEL, and Jacinda Read. “ ‘Having it Ally’: Popular Television (Post-) Feminism.” Feminist Media Studies 2 (2): 231– 249.
Article “‘Having It Ally’: Popular Television (Post-)Feminism” considers the US legal comedy drama Ally McBeal ( Ally Mcbeal. Television Series.
–2002) for its exemplification of the negotiations of prominent themes of post-feminism which can be seen as underpinning Ally’s life choices and those of other female characters coping with similar dilemmas. As they argue, “This is a generation for whom having it all means not giving things up (the pleasure of feminine adornment and heterosexual romance) but struggling to reconcile our feminist desires with our feminine desires” ( MOSELEY, RACHEL, and Jacinda Read. “ ‘Having it Ally’: Popular Television (Post-) Feminism.” Feminist Media Studies 2 (2): 231– 249., 9). Ally's desire for equitable professional treatment and her career ambitions within the legal world were seen by feminist commentators as at odds with her concerns about her ticking body clock (literally symbolised by hallucinations of a bouncing baby), her love life, and her preference for very short skirts. These are not concerns generally associated with women's working lives in the early 1960s, and yet in this juxtaposition of Minster's work and personal life we see such conflicts implicitly working themselves through.
Minster would not have understood herself as a feminist much less described herself as such—this concept and discourses around it had yet to become any fully established part of critical much less popular currency. Yet Minster’s life combined home and family with a professional career. Her professional career in women's magazines moreover highlights her involvement in and enjoyment of her and her readers’ femininity. The particular dilemmas of post-feminism would seem to speak to the lives of women outwith the particular historical context of the mid-1990s problematising easy periodising categorisations of first, second, or third wave feminism.
At the same time Minster's handling of the challenges of home, family, and career is not presented as has been noted earlier as the struggle that it presents for later generations. Does Joanne represent a kind of pre-second-wave-feminism consciousness? Is this perhaps a consciousness that she shared with her creator Hazel Adair herself adroitly managing career, home, and family, all the while very conscious of herself as a woman interested in fashion and appearance priding herself on being well groomed and fashionably turned out? Compact's televisual representations of professional women in the workplace make an important intervention into our historical understanding of the personal and professional lives of women, prompting reconsideration of the situation of discourses of second wave and post-feminist thinking. Whilst women like Joanne Minster were still undoubtedly in a minority in terms of women's employment in this period, nevertheless she represents the underexplored world of the professional women pursuing highly successful careers in an area in which women were managing to make footholds—publishing and the media. Such women included the magazine editors mentioned earlier, women television professionals like Mary Adams Head (Head of Television Talks at the BBC in 1954), Grace Wyndham Goldie (deputy head of the Talks department in the early 1960s and a key figure in the development of British current affairs television), Marguerite Patten, working wife and mother and one of the BBC's first television cookery experts, and of course Adair herself, who with the creation of Compact in Compact.
Television Series. Was then a highly successful professional television writer, managing an extremely demanding job requiring the production of twice-weekly serial television alongside running a home and bringing up her sons in the Surrey countryside.
The Rag Trade—Women Behaving Badly Unlike Compact, two series of The Rag Trade have been preserved and can be viewed on commercially-available DVD collections. Although no concrete evidence exists as to why The Rag Trade was preserved it may well be that as a highly successful situation comedy, a genre not generally perceived as gendered rather than soap opera often seen as implicitly female, lightweight, and not worthy of preservation, its popularity was its defining feature. The episode examined—the third from series two—has been selected because it is illustrative of the series as a whole, with a plot structured around confusion and misunderstanding (in this case mistaken identity), in which slapstick, fast talking comic dialogue, and a general unwillingness on the part of the workforce to get down to work predominate. The Rag Trade operated within the conventions of situation comedy; the same group of characters were effectively “trapped” together in the same location, in this case Fenner's factory, encountering a new situation each week which, when resolved, meant factory life remained unchanged at the beginning of each new episode. Mintz's definition of sitcom in Mills’ genre study is “A half-hour series focused on episodes involving recurrent characters within the same premise. That is, each week we generally find the same people in the same setting. The episodes are finite whatever happens in a given episode is generally closed off explained reconciled solved at the end of the half hour” (Lawerence E.
Mintz in Mills Mills, Brett. The Sitcom TV Genres.
Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press., 28). What differentiates The Rag Trade from the other very popular situation comedies of the period such as Hancock's Half Hour ( Hancock's Half Hour. Television Series. –1961), The Army Game. Television Series.
(1957–1961), and Steptoe and Son. Television Series. (1962–1974), was its female cast and its setting in an almost entirely female workplace. Whilst Compact and The Rag Trade were studio-set, The Rag Trade was filmed before a live audience. Mills says of TV sitcom performances. Many sitcoms are filmed in a manner which mirrors the theatrical experience in front of a live audience [].
Because of the studio audience actors in sitcoms are required to offer a performance which is appropriate for theatre, ensuring that their lines and gestures can be seen by everyone present. (Mills Mills, Brett. The Sitcom TV Genres. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press., 14) This quality of liveness, the resulting larger and more theatrical style of performance, and the ongoing impact of reacting with the studio audience, all augment the sense that daily life on the factory floor was lively and often unpredictable. Fenner Fashions could not be more different to Compact's world of executive offices, smart lady editors, and quiet good taste. If the first on-screen introduction to Compact features a well-spoken receptionist calmly answering the telephone, from the moment we encounter Fenner's factory in this second series episode, broadcast April 27, 1962 our experience is of noise, confusion, and general clutter, jammed into a small, chaotic, run-down working space. Even before the action begins this contrast is underscored by The Rag Trade's opening programme titles.
In contrast to the spare, elegant lettering of the title sequence of Compact, which features simply the series name, The Rag Trade has a women's face created from material offcuts. With tousled woollen hair, swivelling glass eyes, and a zip fastener for a mouth (here pulled shut) the face looks both comical and slightly out of control. The zip suggests that the only way the figure can be made to be quiet is by physically closing its mouth. The face serves as a cartoonish parody of the female characters to be encountered in the series. It reflects the women's unruly and often very physically disruptive workplace behaviour and appearance. If Compact is presented to us as a disciplined and ordered middle-class workplace, then The Rag Trade portrays a factory-floor world, in which women's behaviour and speech is neither controlled nor contained. Indeed, the other prominent difference between the two series is that of class.
The Rag Trade's world is that of a community of working-class women operating in a down-at-heel factory surrounded by bulky old fashioned machinery, much of it evidently on its last legs. Unlike the modern, clean lines of the white-collar office of Compact, The Rag Trade's rough and rundown physical blue-collar milieu links it with a then already disappearing industrial past, rather than the coming world of bright 1960s industries such as advertising, magazines, and photography with which Compact is clearly connected. These are the kinds of creative industries in which Britain would go on to excel in the 1960s and beyond. Britain's international influence in areas such as advertising, music, and photography throughout the 1960s is well documented from the success of new young photographers like David Bailey and Terence Donovan, to the highly influential Collett Dickenson Pearce advertising agency which emerged in the 1960s launching the careers of, among others, David Puttnam, Charles Saatchi, and Alan Parker. The women of The Rag Trade are simultaneously very “modern” in terms of dress and attitude, yet at the same time they lack the social mobility and prospects of their more professional counterparts.
In this respect the women of The Rag Trade are part of the traditional and increasingly old fashioned structures and practices of manufacturing work. The women in The Rag Trade have a very different style to the smart office clothes which we see in Compact. They sport variations of street and popular fashion as opposed to the couture and more conventional fashions of the early 1960s in Compact. In The Rag Trade, the look is dishevelled beehive hairstyles, heavy eye make-up, tight pencil skirts, and precarious stiletto heels. Such styles would have come from a variety of influences from the popular looks associated with rock and roll and cinema, which had been coming out of the US and into the UK since the late 1950s, as well as the popularity of specific Hollywood film stars’ style such as Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe's tight sweaters and skirts. Ken Russell in 1955 had taken a set of photographs of the female counterparts of the teddy boys, elements of whose look can be seen in the Fenner's girls.
See (accessed March 27, 2013). US “rock and roll” styles, filtered through British sensibilities, can also be seen on the young women featured in Karl Reisz's 1959 documentary about a London youth club We Are The Lambeth Boys. See (accessed March 27, 2013). This look has a kind of implicit, unforced sexuality, very different to the classic formality of the Compact staff.
In their conversation and behaviour the girls are laid back, open and very confident in their sexuality, often using it to intimidate and embarrass their bosses. This is a predominantly female workplace, with a tangible sense of female working-class solidarity, the women presented as a tight-knit group brought together on the factory floor.
In fact, their look, attitude, and the environment in which we find them, are reminiscent of the lively, opinionated women we find in the female working-class communities evoked in particular by Ken Loach's much acclaimed 1965 TV interpretation of Dunn, Nell. Up the Junction. London: Virago. Collection of stories of female working-class life in late 1950s and early 1960s Battersea, Up the Junction (1988). Dunn's original text and Loach's play carry a different weight to The Rag Trade's light-hearted comedy about factory girls “cheeking” their bosses.
The central point of comparison is however the visibility of female working-class life and community which both share. Did something of the contemporary shock of the original Up the Junction lie simply in seeing female working-class life as the focus of a drama, when such lives would not have formed part of everyday television fare? In contrast, the women in The Rag Trade are comedic figures, and their world is one of a heightened comedic reality. Arguably, the use of the genre of comedy for the representation of female working-class life is more palatable and easily accommodated. Nevertheless amidst the chaos and the comedy, The Rag Trade, like Up the Junction, gives space to the little observed world of working-class women. This chosen episode focuses on the anticipated visit of a factory inspector who turns out, contrary to all expectations, to be a woman. Mistaken identity, a cross-dressing male colleague, and much hoodwinking of the management are the key drivers of the plot.
Throughout there is constant verbal jousting between boss Fenner (Peter Jones), shop steward Paddy (Miriam Karlin), and Fenner's assistant Reg (Reg Varney), and among the girls on the factory floor. When the inspector turns up, much comic confusion and manipulation ensues to make sure that the real condition of the factory is not exposed. A secondary plotline involves Carol (Sheila Hancock), one of the most outspoken factory women. Her boyfriend is due to return from sea that day.
He is going to come to the factory to pick up a suit he sent Carol money to buy. She has lost the money and there is no suit. Both plotlines become inextricably tangled by the end of the episode.
One of the great pleasures is the very physicality of the subversive comedy which drives the action. Offline Scn Coding Keygen Photoshop on this page. Here are women behaving very badly indeed. What is particularly enjoyable is the way that the women physically and mentally dominate the set.
Worth noting is the physical stature of the lead women characters. Carol and Paddy are tall and rangy in build, and consistently use their imposing physiques to set the humour up. Additionally, the women are both taller than their male bosses—this allows them to “look down” at the men. In the episode it is the men who are the fall guys.
Reg, their supervisor, is the subject of the kind of ribald treatment normally handed out to women. Varney is perhaps best known for his role as bus driver Stan in On the Buses (ITV On the Buses. Television Series. –1973), in which women feature in the main either as the subjects of sexual innuendo, as is the case with the female ticket collectors and passengers featured on the series, or as objects of ridicule as in the case of his sister Olive.
“This has especially been the case for feminist critics who see in sitcom a masculine form of humour in which women are ridiculed unless they conform to a humble but noble calling in life—‘housewife and mother’” (David Marc in Mills Mills, Brett. The Sitcom TV Genres. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press., 21). When he is forced to disguise himself as a woman, Paddy wolf-whistles loudly as he passes and the women slap him on the bottom. Karlin and Hancock deftly exploit their physical unruliness much as a man might, yet never appear as grotesques but rather as appealing and subversive provocateurs. Broadly contemporary television performers such as Eric Morecambe or Bruce Forsyth would make similar use of their height and comedic timing and sharp wit to make other characters look silly rather than simply pulling funny faces for comedic effects.
They are both attractive—although importantly absolutely not “dolly birds,” and this physical appeal works to distance them yet further from categorisation as merely female clowns, dupes, or dumb blondes. Sheila Hancock's character can frequently be seen adroitly parodying or subverting the stereotype of the dumb blonde simultaneously seeming not to quite understand what is going on whilst ending up by getting her own way. The other blondes we encounter on the factory floor are like her subversive and silly but certainly not dumb and not the accessories to male jokes. We laugh at their manipulation of situations, rather than at them as figures of fun.
Both women are also verbally witty and quick. Paddy as shop steward is clearly the smartest person in the factory, at all times shaping events to her and her workmates’ best advantage; Carol is less concerned with controlling events than with deriving fun and entertainment from the situations in which the women find themselves, always able to sidestep the consequences of her actions. The other women act as a physical ensemble on the factory floor, working alongside Paddy and Carol to embody acts of disruption and mischief making, creating chaos and confusion. The Rag Trade's comic action is constantly synthesised with the physical environment which the characters inhabit. One of the key comedy set-pieces in this episode is that the overhead heating pipes are leaky and faulty and make strange noises. The girls sing loudly to try and cover up this noise when the inspector comes. Once again evidenced is the series’ depiction of a female community and shared female culture.
The pipes loom directly above the sewing benches. Much subversive comedy is drawn from the fact that the women at one point matter-of-factly don raincoats and hats in the workplace to shield themselves from the water dripping from the pipes.
Of course the episode's key twist is when the factory inspector turns out to be a woman, rather than the man whom everyone had been expecting. As played by June Whitfield, the inspector is in fact very much the kind of career woman that we might more readily expect to see in the context of an office more like that of Compact. She is well dressed, wearing a smart hat and business-like coat and dress, and she has a slightly prim Scottish accent.
The inference is that this is someone who considers herself unlikely to be bribed, hoodwinked, or taken in. Download Lagu Jamrud Kabari Aku New Version Mp3. As it turns out, her character is drawn into the confusion and uproar created by the women and which always accompany events at Fenner's. Whitfield's character, so keen to stick with the rules, ends up bonding with Reg, who for plot purposes has disguised himself as a woman and furthermore is even claiming to be having trouble with the male boss.
Whitfield sympathises, and offers her/him tips to help sort out a troublesome complexion (here covered with foam in an attempt to disguise an incipient five o'clock shadow): a very odd kind of “female” solidarity. The comedy here is reminiscent of Shakespearian comedies of gender disguise, confusion, and role reversal. In for example A Midsummers Night Dream, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It, cross-dressing, disguise, and dressing up act to fuel comic plots of confusion and misunderstanding. If Whitfield's character is a woman in a man's role who bonds with a man dressed as a woman, then the concluding scenes have the factory women rushing to embrace very lustily, one by one, Carol's newly returned boyfriend, in order to distract him from the fact that Carol has not bought the suit he asked for. The final scenes have the boyfriend eager to kiss Reg, the last remaining “girl” left to kiss him, only for Reg to reveal angrily that he is in fact a man. The closing moments of the episode see the factory inspector, who was meant to be a man, being embraced by Carol's boyfriend who thinks she is one of the factory women. In Kathleen Rowe Karlyn's The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter ( Rowe Karlyn, Kathleen.
The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. Texas: University of Texas Press.
) she suggests that “women might begin to reweave the web of visual power that already binds them by taking the unruly woman as a model—women as rule-breaker, joke-maker, and public bodily spectacle” ( Rowe Karlyn, Kathleen. The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter.
Texas: University of Texas Press., 12). She writes in detail of the physically disruptive, subversive, and empowered comedy performances of Roseanne Barr in her eponymous 1990s sitcom and of the attention-grabbing, show-stealing antics of Miss Piggy in The Muppet Show. Television Series. (ITV 1976–1981). In The Rag Trade, we witness just such performances; the women deploy unruly behaviour to destabilise and rework existing structures of power and authority within the factory, all the while clearly relishing the chaos that their behaviour provokes. Furthermore, throughout this episode we see, albeit in heightened comedic form, women being loud, uncooperative, and verbally and physically funny in their workplace in a way that audiences would not be used to seeing women and especially in the workplace represented.
Such behaviours are not usually visible in media representations of women, never mind women of this period. The big exception here of course is a female comic character that 1960s audiences would be very familiar with—Lucille Ball, playing Lucy Ricardo in I Love Lucy.
Television Series. (CBS 1951–1957).
Lucy, fed up of the humdrum nature of her home life, was always desperate to break into show business like her bandleader husband Ricky (Desi Arnaz), and her desires and actions meant she got herself into weekly scrapes usually involving much physical comedy. However, unlike the characters in The Rag Trade whose behaviour ran unchecked, Lucy would always be censured by Ricky and forced to work within the patriarchal containment strategies which Ricky would design to curb her excesses and teach her a lesson. These ranged from monitoring her spending, to putting Lucy over his knee and mock spanking her for her exploits. At the end of The Rag Trade there is absolutely no sense in which any lessons have been learned or that the women have been chastised for their behaviour. Lucy may not mend her ways from episode to episode, but implicit in the structure of the series are ongoing opportunities for Lucy to see the error of her ways. In The Rag Trade, crazy and anarchic behaviour brings nothing but positive results for the girls and constant amusement as the powerful and authoritative, in this case Fenner and the factory inspector, are bamboozled and manipulated to suit the girls’ purposes.
Operating within the established comedic tradition of the television situation comedy, The Rag Trade recreates some sense of a little-seen daily working experience of female factory workers in the Britain of the early 1960s. The sitcom form makes for a good platform for conveying the robust humour and survival tactics needed to cope with the daily tedium of factory work. In its use of a strong female ensemble cast, it highlights a previously uncelebrated historical world of strong, mouthy, and confident women getting through the work day as best they can, whilst always looking for a way to outwit and “get one over” on management.
Conclusion The analysis of Compact and The Rag Trade offered in this article works to unpack the televisual presentation of the lives of working women of the early 1960s. In both cases, these series concentrated on women's lives at work, showing characters operating outwith the domestic or family roles which might be more readily associated with women's lives in this period. In Compact we watch high-achieving, professional, middle-class women such as Joanne Minster coping with an early version of the “contradictory demands of being female, feminine and feminist” or rather the particular kind that Moseley and Reed ( MOSELEY, RACHEL, and Jacinda Read. “ ‘Having it Ally’: Popular Television (Post-) Feminism.” Feminist Media Studies 2 (2): 231– 249. ) identify in the context of the post-feminist negotiation of professional and personal life represented by 1990s TV characters such as Ally McBeal. Such findings lead us to consider the location of the concept of “having it all” in relation to women's lives and aspirations in the 1990s and beyond, when in fact women could be seen on television some thirty years earlier attempting to find such balances.
The Rag Trade articulates the balancing act that working-class women were also performing in trying to square their lives at the factory with their responsibilities at home. This involved frequently arriving late from breaks due to doing household shopping, wanting to leave the factory early to attend to chores at home, and in one case having to look after a baby in the factory because there was no one at home to look after it. Moreover, the two series’ presentation of these contrasting workplaces nuanced by the women's different social class and the very different institutional values to which they subscribe lets us see working women of the period not as a homogenous group, but instead as having working lives related to specific contexts and particular roles. Here are successful, high powered executives, busy, confident journalists, or in contrast smart, mouthy factory hands making the best of the situation in which they find themselves.
We also observe women having a good time with each other in the workplace, enjoying female company and holding their own with male colleagues. Above all in both Compact and The Rag Trade we see women and their stories taking centre stage, not playing secondary or supporting roles to male narratives. The necessary reinstatement of Compact and The Rag Trade into the histories of soap opera, situation comedy, and women's television permits a more complete historical understanding of both genres.
In the case of Compact, early soap opera was not only domestic or homely in focus but was also aspirational and glamorous, encouraging female viewers to imagine lives for themselves in the city and in interesting rewarding careers. The Rag Trade demonstrates that early 1960s British sitcom was not solely about the very downbeat, domestic, male worlds of Steptoe and Hancock, but also included a series about loud, confident, working-class women at large in the workplace.
For histories of women's television in Britain, critically, the two series demonstrate that television engagement with women at work begins in the early postwar era before any significant cultural absorption of feminist thinking into the workplace and the home, and act to develop and extend extant historical work on the range and variety of women's lives in this period. In interview (September 2011) Adair talked to me about the ten million viewers that Compact regularly received. All subsequent references to Adair are taken from this interview. The Rag Trade had audiences of eleven million and was made into a West End stage show (as recalled in Ronald Wolfe's obituary) and was such a popular format that it was remade in 1977, as well as having international remakes in Norway, Portugal, Australia, and most recently South Africa. See (accessed March 27, 2013). This research was developed as part of the AHRC-funded project A History of Television for Women in Britain 1947–1989, jointly hosted by Warwick and De Montfort Universities.
Although I have been able to view very little of Compact, using the BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC) institutional files for the series, contemporary Radio Times files, and material from the interview with Adair cited above I have been able to recreate a workable understanding of the programme's content, production processes, and the relationship its writers had with their creation. I use the method pioneered by Jason Jacobs in The Intimate Screen ( Jacobs, Jason. The Intimate Screen.
Oxford: Clarendon. ) in which he used floor plans, shooting scripts, and WAC files to reconstruct early BBC TV drama. Allen was to become best known as David Hunter in Adair and Ling's next serial drama Crossroads ( Crossroads. Television Series. Hazel Adair, who also wrote scripts for Emergency—Ward 10 and went on to co-create Crossroads, has throughout her career been involved in writing serial dramas which feature women located in the workplace. This work on Compact developed from the AHRC-funded research project “A History of Television for Women in Britain 1947–1989” run jointly by Warwick and De Montfort Universities.
When principal investigator Rachel Moseley was invited on to BBC Radio 4’s Woman's Hour in August 2011 to discuss the project's work on the programme, presenter Jenni Murray talked about the possibilities of having a career in the media that the programme's portrayal of women in the workplace suggested to her. In Gerry Holloway's Women and Work in Britain since 1840 ( Holloway, Gerry. Women and Work in Britain since 1840. London: Routledge. ) she notes that “The 1950s and 1960s is regarded as a period dominated by the centrality of family life” (2005, 194). However she goes on to explain that after initial rising wartime unemployment there was a high demand for women workers, mentioning “new areas of employment stimulated by the development of the Welfare state and the consumer market” (2005, 194). Both the women producing ready-to-wear fast fashion and the magazine staff of Compact were involved in the production of goods and services which supplied this growing consumer market.
Additionally with the raising of the school leaving age in 1947 to fifteen, “more girls were progressing to colleges and universities and consequently these women were looking for more fulfilling jobs than their mothers had engaged in” (2005, 195). These are the kind of women who might well have sought out the opportunities available in organisations like Compact.
All the editors in chief at British Vogue had been female. The editor of Woman magazine from 1940 to 1962 Mary Grieve, and then editor of Vogue Audrey Withers, were chosen to appear on the 1951 BBC women's television panel discussion series Woman's Viewpoint in which prominent public women discussed issues of contemporary importance. Madge Garland, who had been fashion editor at Vogue in the 1930s, was made the Royal College of Art's first professor of fashion in 1948. She went on to develop and build up the courses taken by leaders of 1960s and 1970s fashion such as Ossie Clark, Zandra Rhodes, and Marion Foale. At the “Career Girls on the Small Screen” event held by the History of Television for Women in Britain project held in October 2011 at the Leicester Phoenix arts centre, this episode of Compact was screened.
Participants remarked both on the upmarket design of the kitchen and some commented how it was very unlike the more modest kitchens they remembered. In the workplace attire of Minster and her senior female colleagues we see something of the mature professional women's workplace wardrobe of the period: smart, simple shift dresses, bold “statement” pieces of costume jewellery, and short, highly lacquered “fixed” hair make up what we can retrospectively describe as embryonic office “power” dressing, twenty years before such a notion became the staple formula for describing the square-shouldered business suits and stiletto heels of the archetypal 1980s female executive. The dresses and bold jewellery of Compact seem like 1980s “power dressing,” a no-nonsense female equivalent of the male business suit. Such looks can be seen in, for example, the formal sheath dresses, tailored suits, and hats to be seen in Vogue magazine features on the Pierre Balmain and Christian Dior collections from 1961 and 1962. Although no concrete evidence exists as to why The Rag Trade was preserved it may well be that as a highly successful situation comedy, a genre not generally perceived as gendered rather than soap opera often seen as implicitly female, lightweight, and not worthy of preservation, its popularity was its defining feature. Mintz's definition of sitcom in Mills’ genre study is “A half-hour series focused on episodes involving recurrent characters within the same premise.
That is, each week we generally find the same people in the same setting. The episodes are finite whatever happens in a given episode is generally closed off explained reconciled solved at the end of the half hour” (Lawerence E. Mintz in Mills Mills, Brett.
The Sitcom TV Genres. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press., 28). Britain's international influence in areas such as advertising, music, and photography throughout the 1960s is well documented from the success of new young photographers like David Bailey and Terence Donovan, to the highly influential Collett Dickenson Pearce advertising agency which emerged in the 1960s launching the careers of, among others, David Puttnam, Charles Saatchi, and Alan Parker. Ken Russell in 1955 had taken a set of photographs of the female counterparts of the teddy boys, elements of whose look can be seen in the Fenner's girls. See (accessed March 27, 2013). US “rock and roll” styles, filtered through British sensibilities, can also be seen on the young women featured in Karl Reisz's 1959 documentary about a London youth club We Are The Lambeth Boys. See (accessed March 27, 2013).
Varney is perhaps best known for his role as bus driver Stan in On the Buses (ITV On the Buses. Television Series. –1973), in which women feature in the main either as the subjects of sexual innuendo, as is the case with the female ticket collectors and passengers featured on the series, or as objects of ridicule as in the case of his sister Olive. “This has especially been the case for feminist critics who see in sitcom a masculine form of humour in which women are ridiculed unless they conform to a humble but noble calling in life—‘housewife and mother’” (David Marc in Mills Mills, Brett. The Sitcom TV Genres. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press., 21). Broadly contemporary television performers such as Eric Morecambe or Bruce Forsyth would make similar use of their height and comedic timing and sharp wit to make other characters look silly rather than simply pulling funny faces for comedic effects.
Sheila Hancock's character can frequently be seen adroitly parodying or subverting the stereotype of the dumb blonde simultaneously seeming not to quite understand what is going on whilst ending up by getting her own way. The other blondes we encounter on the factory floor are like her subversive and silly but certainly not dumb and not the accessories to male jokes. In for example A Midsummers Night Dream, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It, cross-dressing, disguise, and dressing up act to fuel comic plots of confusion and misunderstanding.